Systematic feedback is crucial if you aim to offer a consistently high level of support. It can also be time-consuming, especially when you’re doing it in spreadsheets.
Wasting loads of time on tedious work is one of the main reasons why companies like Automattic, PandaDoc, Figma, and others have switched to a dedicated conversation review tool for their quality assurance needs. It’s working out pretty well for them.
We’ve seen companies spend 70% less time on QA maintenance since they switched to Klaus. That’s left them with 3x more time to focus on what matters – giving feedback to their support agents.
Do you also feel like you need a few extra hours in your workday? A conversation review tool can save you time by making QA a smoother, more efficient process. See which of the following manual activities are eating up your support QA time.
So long, Copy and Paste!
You’ve patiently waited for three whole minutes it takes to open that gigantic spreadsheet that hosts your conversation reviews. You’ve done this before (in fact, you do it every morning), so you already knew to maximize your wait time and grab yourself a coffee while it loads.
You also know that you’re going to need that caffeine boost during the next couple of hours – the time it takes you to copy-and-paste tickets into the spreadsheet. Does that sound familiar?
Copy-pasting data from your help desk software to QA documents is one of the most time-consuming parts of the manual conversation review process. Most teams review hundreds of conversations every month and they want to see information like ticket numbers, URLs, names, dates, and times for each of those interactions in the spreadsheet.
Read on: Customer Service Quality Assurance (QA) Software
However, moving data from one database to another should not be your primary concern. In fact, that’s a job that computers are more than capable of handling on their own. Conversation review tools integrate with your help desk software and – boom! – pull in this data in a matter of seconds.
(We’re really sorry we’ve taken away your dedicated coffee loading time…)
Efficient sampling and goal-setting
While you’re copy-pasting tickets to your feedback spreadsheet, you’re probably running into two more challenges. First, how do you choose which conversations to review; and secondly, how do you distribute them among your reviewers?
Most probably, you want to take a proper look at the outstandingly good and bad customer interactions your team has had. However, to get an accurate picture of how your team is doing, you need to review a random sample of tickets, too. Most companies assess a proportion of their total support volume – usually about 5-10% of it.
Conversation review tools come with a lot of useful sorting options that help you find the tickets that you need to focus on. Moreover, Klaus lets you build your own filters based on the parameters that are important for your team. This way, for example, you can find the conversations that customers rated negatively, or let Klaus create a random assessment sample for you. Or even better, why not combine both of these strategies?
You can also set up review goals for your team, so it’s easy to keep track of your progress. Specific targets and pre-defined samples bring efficiency to your day to day feedback process and make QA become a healthy habit in your customer service.
Read more: Customer Service Quality Assurance – The Complete Guide
Reminders that actually work
The golden rule of support QA says that conversation reviews only work if you really do them. Being the bad cop who has to tell people to do reviews and check their feedback is the most frustrating part of quality assurance for most customer service managers.
You could be wasting hours sending out reminders (and reminders of reminders) to your team. Some managers start every single review round by telling reviewers to go and assess new tickets and end it with letting agents know about the feedback they’ve received.
This isn’t an efficient way to notify your team about their review duties. However, it’s the only way around with spreadsheets.
Conversation review tools, on the other hand, are great at sending out notifications. Klaus even pings agents on Slack to notify them about the new feedback they’ve received. This way you can be sure that nobody misses their part in internal evaluations.
World-class reporting
So, you’ve made it through the daily hassle related to giving feedback to your support agents in spreadsheets. Well done, you deserve a medal! Now, how are you going to report all of this to your managers?
You need an epic spreadsheet setup to get insight into even the most common questions like why is the quality of your support dropping?, where is more training needed? and who on your team has made the most progress? Doing manual data analysis to draw such conclusions can be a real pain.
Some teams don’t even know how to present internal assessment results to their higher-ups in a meaningful way – so, often they don’t do it all. That’s sad because they are missing out on an excellent KPI. Internal Quality Score – the metric used in conversation reviews – reflects how your team is performing based on your internal quality standards and lets you track your team’s progress over time.
Tools like Klaus calculate IQS for you, so that’s another excellent time-saver you should be making use of. Let your managers know how your support efforts are paying off by tracking and reporting your Internal Quality Score.
Most companies who use spreadsheets to manage conversation reviews spend more time on administrative work than the actual internal assessments. No wonder they’re not enjoying the process.
“Klaus integrates directly with Zendesk and that is a huge time-saver as it removes the need for all those manual steps – everything from pasting URLs to sending reminders and creating a rating system,” explains Valentina Thörner Happiness Team Lead at Automattic.
Free up the time you spend on the mundane activities and keep your focus on what’s crucial to help your team grow – support agent feedback. Let conversation review tools do the rest. Give Klaus a go if you haven’t already.
Read more: Customer Service Quality Control Tools Guide for 2022
